Stairway and balcony railings of myriad designs and types have been developed for both residential dwelling stairways and balconies, commercial building stairways and balconies and exterior stairways, balconies or walkways requiring or desirably needing protective and ornamental railings.
Although many prior, so-called modular, railing systems have been developed, these systems tend to be particularly complicated, not easily adapted for providing stairway railings at different stairway slopes or angles to the horizontal and requiring rather complex and costly installation procedures. Alternatively, many ornamental stairway and balcony railing systems, particularly for residential dwelling structures, are typically prefabricated as a complete railing unit or custom fabricated at the installation site. Prefabrication and transport of a complete railing unit to the installation site is often difficult and cumbersome. In many instances the final dimensions of a balcony or stairway may change during construction and, accordingly, a prefabricated system may not fit at installation. On-site installation of prior art type stairway and balcony railings has been somewhat costly and time consuming.
Accordingly, there has been a long-felt need for improvements in ornamental stairway and balcony railing systems for residential dwelling installations, in particular. However, the short-comings of prior efforts in the fabrication and erection of stairway and balcony railings has also been felt for applications in commercial buildings and outdoor stairway and balcony railing installations.
One improvement which has been sought is the simplification of the railing components while providing for decorative and ornamental features which can be somewhat customized for each installation. In this regard it is desirable for the railing to be made up of relatively few parts which may be repeated in a particular pattern as well as arranged in different patterns at other installations so that each application appears to have a custom or semi-custom installation. Another long sought improvement is for a railing system which can be easily adapted to stairways of different slopes or angle of inclination from the horizontal along the stairway rail or stringer. Still further, there has been a desire to provide modular stairway and balcony railing component parts which may be easily formed as curved elements of a selected radius of curvature so that a continuously curved railing system may be provided when needed, which has a custom appearance and yet is made up of a relatively few number of prefabricated railing parts or panels. It is to these ends that the present invention has been developed.